Arrow Wholesale, 5 & 10 stores limp along

Five & 10 stores are a throwback to a simpler time, when families ran small shops full of stuff that catered to their neighbors' shopping habits. They have been dying a slow death, quietly shuttering one at a time, victims of a consumer culture that prefers malls and megastores.

For 85 years, Arrow Wholesale Co. Inc. of Worcester supplied hundreds of these mom-and-pop retail outlets with all manner of kitchen items, stationery, toys, party goods, stuff that falls into a category called "notions," and various other hard-to-find bric-a-brac.

In May 2012, the city's Department of Inspectional Services issued a cease-and-desist order to Elliott Ginsburg, who had owned and operated Arrow Wholesale for 50 years.

Inspectors said the five-story brick warehouse at 28 Water St. had serious structural and safety problems, including a failed support beam on the first floor, sagging floors on three levels, interior stairwells that were "unstable and broken," major masonry cracks, missing or incomplete fire escapes, and more, according to court records.

The place was also stacked, floor-to-ceiling through 45,000 square feet of space, with inventory.

"We were given 30 days to remove everything from the building," said Jamie Ginsburg, Elliott Ginsburg's son, who still runs the business. "It was ridiculous."

In the end, Arrow Wholesale sold its entire inventory to Building 19 for "pennies on the dollar," according to Jamie Ginsburg.

Mr. Ginsburg has since moved Arrow to a 5,000-square-foot warehouse in Webster, which he runs by himself. He estimates he is doing about 20 percent of the business Arrow conducted before the liquidation. Repairing the building at 28 Water St. would have cost "upwards of a million dollars. After awhile, we just stopped getting estimates," he said.

He laid off Arrow's three employees, including his 71-year-old father. The building is for sale.

Arrow's troubles have rippled through to the mom-and-pop stores that depended on Arrow for its supplies.

The West Concord 5 & 10 in downtown West Concord lost half of its inventory source when Arrow suddenly downsized, and the store is struggling as a result, according to a Feb. 27 story in The Boston Globe. O'Brien's Five & 10 in Northboro, which recently closed, was a long-time customer of Arrow.

"Arrow single-handedly took my store out of the ashes of an arson fire and restocked my store with a pay-me-when-you-can policy," former O'Brien's owner Bruce Terry wrote on a Facebook post about Arrow's demise. The May 2012 Facebook post about Arrow has comments from 5 & 10 employees and fans from New Hampshire, Maine and as far away as New Mexico.

Mr. Ginsburg said that Arrow had no problems from city inspectors until the Water Street warehouse got a new neighbor: Winn Development of Boston.

The Arrow warehouse is separated from the new Canal Lofts housing development, at 48 Water St., by a 6-foot-wide alley.

Winn Development has converted the former Chevalier Furniture building into a 64-unit apartment complex.

"All I know is we operated for years there without any problems," Mr. Ginsburg said. "Then they came in, and all of the sudden, we've got inspectors everywhere."

Worcester Fire Chief Gerard A. Dio said the city's Inspectional Services Department's inspection of Arrow's warehouse — which is a former wire factory — was triggered by an annual Fire Department inspection. The 2012 inspection uncovered problems with the building's sprinkler system, the aging elevator and flammable materials (stuff made of plastic, mostly).

"The sprinklers weren't set right. Stuff was piled up floor-to-ceiling, no aisles," said Chief Dio. "It was a bad situation. We were going to end up losing guys in there if there was a fire."

He said the Fire Department warned Elliott Ginsburg repeatedly over the years about problems in the building, but the 2012 inspection found that things had gotten worse, not better. And fire prevention inspectors noticed some structural problems. They notified inspectional services, who ended up taking Elliott Ginsburg to court.

"What we needed them to do would not have cost them a million dollars," Chief Dio said. "I can't speak to the structural problems."

In Webster, Jamie Ginsburg said the scaled-down version of Arrow Wholesalers has yet to turn a profit, after 10 months in business.

"I'm going to keep it going as long as I possibly can," he said. "We'll just see what happens."